Drippers EP

70s Gymnastics; 2008

Find it at:

Last month saw the release of Fucked Up Friends, the first solo album from a member of Pittsburgh surrealists Black Moth Super Rainbow. Recorded and performed by Tobacco, the band's reclusive frontman, the record aimed to transform BMSR's giddy psychedelia into instrumental hip-hop. With such a lateral move, the album also didn't offer clues to the course of BMSR's follow-up to 2007 breakout Dandelion Gum. And so we look to Drippers, an odds-and-sods EP aimed at avid fans (its release is limited to just 2,000-- no joke-- scratch'n'sniff copies) for some sense of what may come next from the group. Unfortunately, the EP doesn't hint at a shift in style or a new direction and, at worst, raises questions about their ability to work outside of an already established format.

Part of Dandelion Gum's appeal was its ability to show an eerie, darker side of stargazing psych-pop-- its songs seeming to exist in the exact moment when an acid trip starts to go sour. The record's mix of electronics and more traditional instruments nurtured that atmosphere: The album's many treated vocals didn't seem gimmicky because they lent the record an air of detached strangeness. Virtually all of Drippers' nine songs lean heavily on the same analog synths-and-vocoder approach. Here, that combo starts to feel less like a creative tool and more like a formula.

To be fair, not all of Drippers' tracks are recent however-- and at least one ("We Are the Pagans") is an outtake from Gum. But it's harder to forgive the newer cuts: "Black Yogurt", which features a bubbly bassline courtesy of Mike Watt, cleverly bends its synths into vocal sounds-- a neat touch-- but is otherwise forgettable, its arrangement too similar to older material. Despite incorporating some of the fuzzy boom-bap that was prevalent on Fucked Up Friends, "Milk Skates" and "One Day I Had an Extra Toe" also stay within the group's neatly defined parameters. Said to pre-date BMSR's formation, "I Saw Brown" is one of the few tracks that sound unique-- a simple Sega Genesis beat sits next to a jerkily strummed acoustic guitar-- but it lacks melody and stops short of achieving listenability.

Elsewhere, "Zodiac Girls" and "Happy Melted City" finds BMSR tweaking their formula-- the latter drawing on lush, almost shoegaze-y vocals amidst a backdrop of interplaying synths. It's precisely the kind of imaginative step the group should take. The spare, tape-hiss-heavy "Changing You All" is the closest this outfit gets to an expressive ballad, and it's a refreshing change of pace. Drippers' only real surprise is a remix of "Just for the Night" by D.C. singer/pianist Laura Burhenn. Here, Tobacco and co. build upon a rough sketch of a hip-hop underpinning and flesh out the original's sashaying doo-wop with synth flutters. It's the EP's final track, and it serves both as a palate cleanser and a reminder of what seems lacking from the album's lesser songs-- raw emotion and untreated vocals. Drippers is merely a stopgap partially constructed of older material, but it still seems like time to hope BMSR begins to step out from behind their masks, pseudonyms, and vocoders and give us something different.